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Great
changes have taken place in
Shanghai People's conception towards marriage, revealed a survey recently
conducted by the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau and the
prestigious East China Normal University.
A foreigner enjoys a tete-a-tete with a Chinese girl at a local bar.
Great changes have taken place in Shanghai People's conception towards marriage, revealed a survey recently conducted by the Shanghai Civil Affairs Bureau and the prestigious East China Normal University. International marriage, a common fact among Shanghai families
According to the survey, among each 100
locally registered couples in today's Shanghai there are an
average of 3 cases involving foreign nationals, a rate higher
than that of any other Chinese provinces or cities.
Statistics showed that
from 1996 to 2002 the city saw more than 21,000
foreigner-involved marriage registrations, or 3,000 couples on
yearly average, a figure more than eight times higher over 1980.
"Each working
day we grant marriage certificates to an average of 13 mixed
couples, so as to guarantee their legal rights", said an
official in charge of marriage registration of the Bureau. The
"other half" in mixed couples comes from 40-odd countries and
regions, nearly 40 percent being from
Japan,
13 percent from
Taiwan,
and 5 percent from
Hong Kong.
Twenty years ago, the survey found, most international marriages
in shanghai fell into the pattern in which local young girls,
driven by the desire of changing their life through marriage,
sought foreign men much older than themselves. While in recent
years the age gap between the two parties of a couple have been
narrowed and each year saw an average of 300
Shanghai men capture their overseas brides
and take them home.
With the increased
number of international marriages,
Shanghai residents began to view the
trans-cultural and trans-national event more tolerably.
A few years ago, Yao
Tinglai, a
Shanghai resident, felt more or less
uncomfortable when he learned that his daughter was to marry a
high-nosed American. Yet now he draws his biggest pleasure from
chatting with his foreign "son-in-law" and changing diaper for
his blue-eyed grandson who is no more than six months old.
"Although we and Daniel
are of different cultural backgrounds and living habits, we are
still able to find topics of common interest", said Yao, adding
that he and his wife were quite satisfied with their son-in-law,
and to better communicate with him the old couple began to learn
English in leisure time.
Besides, the "get
married and then go abroad" pattern in
Shanghai's international marriages has
changed silently, and more and more people involved in mixed
marriages choose to work and settle down in the prospering
Chinese city.
Marriage pattern reflects dramatic city changes
Beginning from 1980 the international
marriages in Shanghai city showed a tendency of zigzagged
increase, with the number of registered couples climbing from
396 in 1980 up to 2690 in 2002, the survey told.
The shooting up of such
marriages in the early 1980s, a local civil official analyzed,
is chiefly because of Shanghai people's sudden realization that
their city had been left behind the world after years of self
isolation, and as a result many women got determined to improve
their living standards through marrying abroad.
In this period a considerable number of mixed couples, many of
them rushed into marriage after only two or three dates, found
great gaps between them in age, education level and language,
and a lack of love basis often led to crisis in later days.
After 1985 overseas investment flooded
Shanghai, together with foreign stuff sent
to work in the city. The Shanghai natives thus had much more
opportunities in meeting, communicating and understanding
foreigners, which triggered off the flourishing of mixed
marriage since 1989.
Marriages in this
period also showed a magnificently improved quality, with
narrowed gaps in age, education and language within a couple.
The dating time also lengthened and many newly wedded built
their home in
Shanghai.
What's interesting is,
after hitting a record of 3,422 pairs in 2001, the registration
number of mixed couples dropped to 2,690 in 2002.
Two reasons possibly
contributed to the phenomenon, said Ding Jinhong, director of
the Population Research Institute of the said university. First,
the
Shanghai people have learned to use more
reason in choosing their life-long partners instead of merely
focusing their eyes on money. Second, more people chose to
register their marriage abroad since it's easier for them to
cross country borders.
"For today's Shanghai
people, it's no longer important from where their partners come,
but whether they are suitable for each other and whether they
could respect and bring happiness to each other", said Yu Jian,
a local expert on marriage problems. "The psychological
transformation represents the dramatic changes in Chinese
people's concepts for marriage brought about by the opening up
and economic development in last two decades".
Shorten the distance with the world
According to the survey, Shanghai people
have entered into marriage with people from more than 40
countries and regions, showing a wider range and a stronger hue
of globalization.
Between the 1980s and early 90s, Shanghai
natives mainly picked their spouses from overseas Chinese and
those from Hong Kong,
Macao
and
Taiwan, for the two parties shared the same cultural background
without language barriers.
Since the 90s
Japan has become the biggest trade partner
of the city with Japanese people taking a large percentage of
foreign naturals living in Shanghai, which gave rise to
increased number of China-Japan couples. In recent seven years,
the number of China-Japan new weds has taken up 40 percent of
the city's total international marriages.
In 2002 a quarter of
the city's mixed marriages involved European and American
nationals, a result of closer ties with westerners in economic
and cultural cooperation and exchanges. |
